Archive for December, 2018

Gatwick Airport – The hero of the hour? – I can’t decide if it’s more like Wall-E or Johnny 5.

If your family is driving you crazy at Christmas, spare a thought for those whose travel plans have been disrupted by the drone incident at Gatwick Airport. Here are the numbers at the time of writing this…

Over 1,000 flights cancelledAirport shut down three times over three days 140,000 passengers stranded

Here at PS Programmes Towers, we travel a lot for business, and a few years back got caught up in the fallout of Eyjafjallajökull, the eruption that did for air travel what it just did to our spellcheck. But we’re not just seeing ourselves bedding down for the night on the shiny floor of the North Terminal; we chair aviation conferences / summits and write crisis communications and contingency plans for the aviation industry. So, our interest is more professional than pure sympathy.

Crisis communications – because saying nothing is not an option…

Donald Trump has made many of us in the communications business shift uncomfortably in our seats in the last couple of years.

When Trump became President, he pretty much took the standard advice of the speaker coach, screwed it up, and threw it back in our faces: be clear in what you mean, we said. Own your authority on what you’re talking about, we said, and admit when you don’t. Thank other people, be the best version of yourself you can be, give people something to aspire to.

As a speaker, Trump is boring, repetitive, ill-informed, divisive, unaffecting and a million other things that we’d warn you away from. Clear message? No, he rambles and repeats, so that people take away what they think they’ve heard. Authority? Nobody has better advisors than the US President, but Trump’s commentary sounds like he glimpsed a headline over someone’s shoulder. And as for being the best version of yourself, the president’s crossed arms / bottom lip out pose is familiar to anyone who’s ever tried to get a four-year-old to eat their greens.